Free Republic

A major project has been quietly underway, within the executive branch of the U.S. government, trying to calculate a "social cost of carbon" (SCC) -- a so-called "non-market externality" (i. e., not captured by the normal price system of a free market). This calculated cost would then be imposed on all government programs in order to "fix" the price system -- so they say. The SCC report was published in May 2013, with little fanfare; public comments had to be submitted by Sept. 16. But this whole misconceived exercise has no valid scientific basis and can destroy the supply of...

The outgoing government in Norway has buried much-vaunted plans to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground amid mounting costs and delays. The oil and energy ministry said the development of full-scale carbon dioxide capture at Mongstad oil refinery had been discontinued. It said it remained committed to research into carbon capture. When the Labour Party presented the plan in 2007, it was hailed as Norway's equivalent of a "Moon landing". Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his allies lost a general election to conservatives and centrists this month, and are due to step down shortly. Mongstad had already run into...

The UN's climate change panel is set to release a report next month that reluctantly concludes there has been no warming of the earth in at least the last 15 years. Fewer and fewer people are believers that climate change is man made. This hasn't stopped the Obama administration from releasing new rules governing "carbon pollution" at new power plants that would mean the virtual destruction of the coal industry.

The outgoing government in Norway has buried much-vaunted plans to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground amid mounting costs and delays. The oil and energy ministry said the development of full-scale carbon dioxide capture had been discontinued. "At both the national and international level, the development of technologies to capture and store CO2 has taken longer, been more difficult and more costly than expected," Oil and Energy Minister Ola Borten Moe told reporters.

Linking global warming to public health, disease and extreme weather, the Obama administration pressed ahead Friday with tough requirements to limit carbon pollution from new power plants, despite protests from industry and Republicans that it would dim coal's future. Under the law once the Environmental Protection Agency controls carbon at new plants, it will also control carbon at existing plants — a regulation the agency said Friday it would start work on immediately to meet a June 2014 deadline. The revised standards, the company said in a statement, "essentially eliminate coal as a future generation option."

The Obama administration on Friday announced that it was not backing down from a confrontation with the coal industry and would press ahead with enacting the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies. The proposed regulations, announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration will press ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming. The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It's also a key step in President Barack Obama's global warming plans, because it would help end what he called "the limitless dumping of carbon pollution" from power plants. Although the proposed rule won't immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force...

President Barack Obama's top energy and environmental officials said Wednesday there is a future for coal, despite a pending regulation aimed at limiting global warming pollution from new power plants that Republicans and the coal industry say will doom the fuel source. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, questioned at a House hearing, both said coal-fired power would continue. Coal makes up about 40 percent of U.S. electricity. "The rule will provide certainty for the future of new coal moving forward, and in terms of existing facilities, coal will continue to represent a significant source of energy...

PRIME Minister-elect Tony Abbott has personally instructed his new departmental secretary to make preparations to axe the carbon tax and activate Operation Sovereign Borders to stop asylum boats. Mr Abbott got down to business this morning after his landslide election victory, with a briefing with Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary Ian Watt. Meetings were scheduled with Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson and Finance Department head David Tune, while Mr Abbott was also due to hold talks with senior Coalition colleagues later in the day. He told Dr Watt to prepare the ground for the Coalition to implement its agenda...

OTTAWA--Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has told U.S. President Barack Obama that he's ready to work on joint plan between the two countries to reduce carbon emissions in the energy sector in an effort to secure approval of the Keystone XL pipeline project, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Friday. The CBC, citing unnamed sources, said Mr. Harper wrote to Mr. Obama in late August, signaling he is ready to accept carbon-reduction targets proposed by the U.S. and prepared to work with the White House to address concerns raised about Keystone and its impact on greenhouse-gas emissions. A spokesman for Mr....

Three months ago, the Obama administration made a little-noticed but potentially pivotal move in the stepped-up fight against climate change: it boosted the U.S. government's official estimate of the future economic damage caused by carbon pollution. The move should make it much easier for the EPA and other federal bureaus to enact tougher measures to crack down on emissions by showing that the greater benefits of such measures will justify their costs. "This has all the characteristics of a stealth approach toward making a greenhouse gas rule more justifiable by exaggerating the social benefits," said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for...

Global warming and climate change are usually thought to mean that world sea levels will rise, perhaps disastrously. But according to US government boffins, in recent times (2010 and 2011, to be precise) phenomena driven by human carbon emissions have actually caused world sea levels to fall.The seas have, of course, been rising steadily as the climate has changed for thousands of years, ever since the end of the last ice age. During the 20th century, according to estimates mostly from erratic tide gauges, sea levels rose by around 1.7mm a year. Since the early 1990s, satellites have also been...

Back in 2010, I pointed out that White House science adviser John Holdren had made a shift in naming conventions for the twice renamed “global warming”. The lexicon shift in 2010 It seems that another shift in the lexicon has occurred, again at the White House. Organizing for Action, President Obama’s campaign machine declared Tuesday that there was a new name.The Washington Times picked up on this shift, and I’ve updated the graphic to reflect the new name.  There’s also a poll to choose/predict the next name after this one. The doomed planet movement has been losing momentum. Inconvenient scientific...

It’s amazing that minuscule bacteria can cause life-threatening diseases and infections –- and miraculous that tiny doses of vaccines and antibiotics can safeguard us against these deadly scourges. It is equally incredible that, at the planetary level, carbon dioxide is a miracle molecule for plants -– and the “gas of life” for most living creatures on Earth.

The problem with bad ideas from Europe is that they eventually become bad ideas in America too. And so it goes with the latest nitwit scheme from Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party, which is cousin to our own liberal Democrat Party, separated not ideologically or by a vast ocean, but only by accents. The Lib Dems want to outlaw gas and diesel powered cars from the United Kingdom with a goal to create a “zero-carbon” UK by 2040. No word yet whether they will allow people to “breathe,” which-- incidentally to Lib Dems it seems-- also pushes carbon into the atmosphere....

Credit to The Australian for printing both points of view. Published as an Op-Ed today.Carbon credits market is neither free nor worth anything by: Joanne NovaFrom: The Australian July 31, 2013 12:00AM THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream. A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At...

For the past several years, those seeking to strangle the world economy by denying it access to carbon have tried to gain support for their initiatives by inventing a concept called “the social cost of carbon.” According to this notion, the use of carbon imposes a cost on society through global warming, and therefore regulations to restrict the use of carbon create benefits that can be measured in dollar terms. Pursuant to this strategy, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 hired a crowd of consultants to generate estimates that would be useful for the cause. This they dutifully did, producing...

First, a grainy image of a hose on fire; next, a slow shot of verdant, rain-drenched woods. That’s how Josh Fox’s documentary film Gasland II opens, and it encapsulates his vision of the two sides of the fracking debate: those who seek to destroy nature, and those who defend it. What follows is more than two hours of disturbing footage of the dangers of fracking.As the title suggests, the film is a sequel, and Fox ominously, smugly narrates that “in sequels, the empire strikes back.” The empire, in this case, is the oil and gas industry. And in a way,...

Having grown up on a farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley, I have seen firsthand how environmental extremists smashed a flourishing agricultural region. Citing the need to protect a three-inch baitfish called the Delta smelt, green activists succeeded in getting farmers’ water supplies drastically cut. As some of the world’s most productive soil degenerated into a drought-stricken landscape, farmers — some of whose families had worked these lands for generations — packed up and left. The local economy sank, with unemployment in the Valley now doubling the national average. President Obama’s recent speech unveiling his “new national climate action plan”...

Africans can burn coal. Americans can’t. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the Obama administration’s most recent forays into energy policy. On June 25, President Obama was at Georgetown University decrying “carbon pollution” and making it clear that he will prohibit any new coal-fired power plants from being built in the U.S. Five days later, while Obama was in Africa, the White House released a fact sheet on its “Power Africa” initiative that aims to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa by helping finance some 10,000 megawatts of new generation capacity in that region. During his Georgetown speech,...